I first blogged about joining Evostock last September. Evostock is "an online collective of highly creative professional photographers and visual artists providing clients one place to search across a large edited collection of high quality stock imagery."

Evostock has recently been featured in the spring bulletin of ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers) available here (free registration required). The article features some incredible photography by Evostock members.

 

I have recently joined Evostock, a virtual agency on Photoshelter where photographers can come together to present their combined work to art buyers. From Evostock's homepage:

Evostock is a online community of highly creative professional photographers coming together with their imagery to provide clients one place to search across a large collection of the highest quality images from a wide spectrum of photographers and perspectives. Evostock is committed to providing fresh, new, and evolved images for this evolving world we live and work in.

I invite other stock photographers on Photoshelter to join Evostock by contacting Tim McGuire at the email address listed on the Evostock homepage.

Several of my stock photography images are included in galleries highlighted on MIRA's homepage. I thought including those images here would be a good excuse for a blog.

I still find it pretty amazing to have my images seen next to true greats like Ron Niebrugge, Galen Rowell, David Fleetham, and so many others. As I was assembling these images below, it also struck me that the oldest of them, the shot of the yellow rose at the bottom, is a shot that is over 10 years old. Hopefully it will remain a timeless image. I don't know that I'm a great photographer, but I'm certainly on a irreversible path on becoming an old one. :)

Seascape

Commercial fishing scene along the waterfront of Portland, Maine.

Conceptual

Dart in a dart board

Americana

Statue of Elvis Presley inside the Tennessee State Welcome Center on Riverside Drive in Memphis

Evening shot of the North Portico of The White House in Washington, D.C.

Spirit

Lit prayer candles inside Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, France.

Catholic priest walking into a confessional inside St. Peter's Basilica. Vatican City, Rome, Italy.

Details

Yellow Rose

While the economy may be bad, clients are still licensing pictures. January marked my highest sales figures ever with image licenses across four different continents and several with worldwide rights. This includes sales made through agencies and direct sales. I've been focused on other things so far this year, but I plan to start posting to this blog more soon and writing some book reviews, DIY articles, etc. during the coming weeks.

I know... I know... It's been forever since I've blogged last. I've been really busy though! I wish I could say I've spent the whole last month taking pictures and didn't blog because I could never get a good sat-com up-link from my hut on a South Pacific beach, but unfortunately that's not an honest excuse... I thought I would get back into the blog spirit by posting some recently published work over the past month and rambling about the pictures. This picture of the Clinton Library in Little Rock is not my best. Frankly, I don't even like that much. I have others captured in much better light; however, I like it much better now that someone has paid for it. :-)

William J. Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas

Paris is probably my most favorite city in the world. Actually, I'm not a big fan of cities, so I would say Paris IS my most favorite city. I get an extra thrill whenever any of my Paris images are licensed, like this one from Napoleon's tomb:

Alter inside Dome Church housing Napoleon's Tomb in Paris, France.

The streets of Paris may be in French but at least they are pronounceable (for Americans like me), as opposed to trying to tell your friends back home what a great time you had on the Lauriergracht Canal in Amsterdam. The what? Did you catch a cold on the plane?

Evening sunlight on Lauriergracht Canal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

A couple years back I did a large collection of digital illustrations in Photoshop that I coined "The Pixel Exhilaration Collection". Apparently the only one exhilarated by them was me because they've never sold well. A magazine in Russia just picked this one up for their recent issue though. I just hope they realize it's not a REAL galaxy:

abstract colorful digital galaxy purple space swirl swoosh twirl universe whirlpool whorl from the Pixel Exhilaration Collection

I started as a serious, "aspiring" professional photographer a little over ten years ago. At that time, if you wanted to be published professionally you had to shoot slide film and submit slides to publishers. Fuji Velvia was "IT". If you weren't shooting Velvia as a professional landscape photographer, then you simply didn't know what you were doing. If you were shooting Velvia then at least you "looked" like you knew what your were doing. (Or your credit card bill did anyway. It was about $12 a roll with processing.) My very first roll of Fuji Velvia that I ever shot was on a trip to Vancouver, British Columbia (tacked onto a business trip) ten years ago this past October. The picture below of the Capilano River is not from that very first roll, but it was one of the first. While I've been fortunate to have licensed many images from that trip over the years, I'm being historically retrospective here because this image was recently licensed to a publication in South Korea almost exactly ten years from the date I took it. I'm sentimental like that. (Sorry, this blog doesn't come with a cinematic, deeply sentimental musical score.)

Capilano River seen from the overlook at the Capilano Suspension Bridge in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

For all of the aspiring professional photographers out there, when I started ten years ago I told myself it might take ten ten years to reach the level that I wanted to be at. I expected it to take that long when I started. As it turns out, my natural artistic ability contributed a lot early on, but ten years later I still haven't reached "that level" and I'm not even sure what it is anymore. I've learned a lot, but I now know that there is so much I don't know, even after ten years of trying to learn it. In another ten years I doubt I'll feel any different.

Last week the UK-based Alamy stock photo library announced that they're going to increase their commission fees by five percent (thus decreasing photographer's income by five percent) in order to open a U.S. office in New York and start competing for the commercial use dollars which Getty dominates. This has stirred up quite a bit of controversy on many of the photo forums. Not many people are happy that they're funding their American expansion with money out of suppliers pockets.

In particular, John Harrington posted on his Photo Business News blog that he thinks its a terrible move and a cover for CEO James West to shop Alamy around NY and find a buyer.

I disagree, and I posted these comments on his blog post:

John, I politely disagree with you. I think this is a great approach and a good business strategy. Atypical yes, but good nonetheless.

Alamy has a very predictable and ever increasing revenue stream. (Their sales and revenue figures are freely available on their website.)

CEO James West's approach ensures a consistent monthly budget within which to build the New York office. It is far better than raising million of dollars like Photoshelter did and then blowing it all in a few months. Competing with Getty in the commercial use market will take YEARS. It takes years because it's a game of major corporations like Alamy making inroads and preferred vendor agreements with large advertising firms and other major corporations. Longevity is key. As James said in their press release, "Around 80 per cent of our revenue comes from high value, high volume large accounts but we are under-exposed in this market in the US." If they can stay within their budget, then I think this will give them the time they need.

If they can just get a foot-hold, then it's self-perpetuating. Increased revenue from U.S. sales means more money they poor back into the market on advertising and free Martini hours for NY ad execs.

If it fails, so what? It would be an embarrassment obviously, but at least they will not be out millions of dollars in debt.

As far as whether this is a move to shop Alamy around NY and look for a buyer, I just don't think so. The market timing would be terrible and with the weak dollar I don't see any U.S. firms running out to buy foreign companies. I'm sure Alamy is quite a cash cow for its owners.

I also suspect James West thrives on a challenge and competing with Getty and Corbis in the U.S. gives him that. If Alamy eventually gains 33% of the U.S. market, then yeah, he might get bored and want to sell it off and do something else.

For now, I support the move, and I'm not pulling my images.

My heart sank today as I read an email from PhotoShelter announcing that the PhotoShelter Collection is closing. I have spent hundreds of hours over the past year getting over one-thousand stock images on-line and pushed through their incredibly difficult keywording system. There are hundreds of other photographers in the same position.

Honestly, I never expected Digital Railroad and PhotoShelter to both succeed longer term. They were too similar to one another, but I didn't expect PhotoShelter to bail out so fast.

As one of many who have invested so much time with them as a stock agency, I was very angered by CEO Allen Murabayashi blog posting blaming their failure on the industry instead of their own incompetence and failure as business people. Listing things like Getty's dominance, PhotoShelter's inability to succeed on the research request market, and the "crowd-source model for stock will likely never work", Mr. Murabayashi is oblivious to all of the other profitable stock agencies in the marketplace who are succeeding on those very fronts and whose names are not "Getty", the most notable of which are Alamy and Digital Railroad. (DR certainly beat PhotoShelter to the research request market and appears to be doing quite well.)

One thing that is not debatable is that it takes a long, long time to gain traction in the stock industry. The fact that the PhotoShelter Collection didn't have the resolve or the capital to build a business over the longer time makes me highly question their ability to be sustainable as a company, even though they've pledge to keep operating the Photoshelter Archive. As of this writing the galleries and search features of my website are all driven by and integrated with my images on the PhotoShelter Archive. Now I, and all of their photographers I believe, will have to reevaluate that as PhotoShelter no longer deserves our faith and confidence.

How many weeks will be before an email appears completely out of nowhere, just like the one we received today, announcing that the PhotoShelter Archive is dead? All customer lightboxes inaccessible? All integrated websites non-function effective immediately?

Mira, the stock agency of the Creative Eye Cooperative, has recently added a new Green Issues gallery of environmental photography to their homepage. I'm honored that six of my images are included in their featured collection including this one which I captured earlier this year: I'm also pleased to report that the following image from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam of school children viewing The Nightwatch by Rembrandt van Rijn was licensed twice to a textbook publisher through Mira. While a picture like this may not be the most edgy form of photography, editorial images are the lifeblood of a lot stock photographers like myself. Besides, I remember when I first looked at this very painting pictured in a textbook when I was a school kid as well!

I guess this might be old news to some (it came out Oct 16th), but I just ran onto it today so it's new to me.

For anyone interested in licensing stock photography, the American Society of Picture Professionals (West Chapter) held a panel discussion with several photo buyers called "Stock License and Prices -- A Buyer's Perspective". You can download the audio from their website. There are three MP3 files to download. It was a great discussion and a great vote of confidence for those of us who license rights-managed photography.

http://www.aspp.com/pages/146/145/0/

I'm pleased to announce that this website has been featured on Photoshelter's homepage as one of their "seamless customization" examples. TerrySmithImages.com has been completely redesigned since the beginning of this year and in the process integrated with our image archive hosted by Photoshelter. You can now search for images, browse more galleries, and license photography directly from our website!